The bully has declared his intention to push Europe into fascism.

It seems that Europe must build up its strength until it can simultaneously resist both Putin and the bully.

*More than 9,000 children in Gaza hospitalised for acute malnutrition in October, UN says. Aid agencies say Israel is still restricting their aid shipments despite ceasefire announced two months ago.*

* The climate crisis supercharged the deadly storms that killed more than 1,750 people in Asia by making downpours more intense and flooding worse, scientists have reported. Monsoon rains often bring some flooding but the scientists were clear: this was "not normal".*

A UN committee reports: "Food and fossil fuel production causing $5bn of environmental damage an hour."

That is 51 trillion dollars per year.

We should not hesitate to invest trillions of dollars to end that damage. It will be a profitable investment if we invest enough.

But we should take care not to let big businesses own the results of that investment.

Long-time activist Rosa Parks started the Montgomery bus boycott with a shot in the dark, no advance plan. The blacks of Montgomery had an organized and motivated community which seized the opportunity.

We need to continue trying to launch resistance against today's unjust systems, including proprietary operating systems.

*No, New York City's wealthiest are not fleeing the city after Mamdani's win.*

Putin applauds the bully's pressure on Europe to give up defending Ukraine.

*All of the deadly US [attacks] on alleged drug boats are murders.*

Plutocratist politicians are so in thrall to lobbyists that they voted to deny the US military the right to repair its own equipment.

In peacetime, the inability to make a nontrivial fix can waste taxpayers' money. In battle, it can be deadly. There may be no time to fly a repairman to a war zone; the repairman might even refuse to go.

Everyone deserves the right to repair — which is related to software freedom.

US citizens: call on Amazon to come to the table with Amazon Labor Union.

See the instructions for how to sign this letter campaign without running any nonfree JavaScript code--not trivial, but not hard.

As I explained in some detail in my 2016 article "They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo", I commissioned this artwork from Shepard Fairey to use as the branding of the newly-founded mozilla.org and our open source release of the Netscape source code, which eventually became Firefox. This happened in March 1998.

• I am 100% certain that we (Netscape) purchased the artwork outright.

• I am 99% certain that some time in 1998 or 1999, the artwork was open sourced under the terms of the then-new Netscape Public License.

However, I find that I can't actually prove either of these things. Can you?

I see this document that was on the Mozilla.org web site in 2005 that asserts that, though the rest of the web site is CC BY-SA 2.0, the red dinosaur is trademarked.

I don't believe that's true. I think that's lawyerly overreach. I believe the dinosaur had already been released and could not be clawed back in this way.

But what do I know. Anyway, here are all of the original vector images. Come at me.

These are the first batch of drawings that Shepard did for us. The original files were PostScript, but I have converted them to PDF and PNG for modern sensibilities:

PS, PDF.

PS, PDF.

PS, PDF.

You probably didn't know the dinosaur had legs!

Here's the artwork for the CD we gave away at the first anniversary party in 1999.

Ai, PDF.

And here are some "Netscape Now!"-style banners that some other division inside Netscape commissioned a different design firm to make, shortly thereafter. (Why they didn't just get Shepard to do it, I don't know.) Some of these were once hosted on mozilla.org.

Round two:

(If you don't see a whole bunch of wide banner anim-GIFs above, turn off your ad blocker on this site! Yes, it tripped me up too.)

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

I posted the following on my Fediverse (via Mastodon) account. I'm reposting the whole seven posts here as written there, but I hope folks will take a look at that thread as folks are engaging in conversation over there that might be worth reading if what I have to say interests you. (The remainder of the post is the same that can be found in the Fediverse posts linked throughout.)

I suppose Fediverse isn't the place people are discussing Rob Reiner. But after 36 hours of deliberating whether to say anything, I feel compelled. This thread will be long,but I start w/ most important part:

It's an “open secret” in the FOSS community that in March 2017 my brother murdered our mother. About 3k ppl/year in USA have this experience, so it's a statistical reality that someone else in FOSS experienced similar. If so, you're welcome in my PMs to discuss if you need support… (1/7)

… Traumatic loss due to murder is different than losing your grandparent/parent of age-related ailments (& is even different than losing a young person to a disease like cancer). The “a fellow family member did it” brings permanent surrealism to your daily life. Nothing good in your life that comes later is ever all that good. I know from direct experience this is what Rob Reiner's family now faces. It's chaos; it divides families forever: dysfunctional family takes on a new “expert” level… (2/7)

…as one example: my family was immediately divided about punishment. Some of my mother's relatives wanted prosecution to seek death penalty. I knew that my brother was mentally ill enough that jail or prison *would* get him killed in a prison dispute eventually,so I met clandestinely w/my brother's public defender (during funeral planning!) to get him moved to a criminal mental health facility instead of a regular prison. If they read this, it'll first time my family will find out I did that…(3/7)

…Trump's political rise (for me) links up: 5 weeks into Trump's 1ˢᵗ term, my brother murdered my mother. My (then 33yr-old) brother was severely mentally ill from birth — yet escalated to murder only then. IMO, it wasn't coincidence. My brother left voicemail approximately 5 hours before the murder stating his intent to murder & described an elaborate political delusion as the impetus. ∃ unintended & dangerous consequences of inflammatory political rhetoric on the mental ill!…(4/7)

…I'm compelled to speak publicly — for first time ≈10 yrs after the murder — precisely b/c of Trump's response.

Trump endorsed the idea that those who oppose him encourage their own murder from the mentally ill. Indeed, he said that those who oppose him are *themselves causing* mental illnesses in those around them, & that his political opponents should *expect* violence from their family members (who were apparently driven to mental illness from your opposition to Trump!)… (5/7)

…Trump's actual words:

Rob Reiner, tortured & struggling,but once…talented movie director & comedy star, has passed away, together w/ his wife…due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, & incurable affliction w/ a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME…He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of…Trump, w/ his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as [my] Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness…

My family became ultra-pro-Trump after my mom's murder. My mom hated politics: she was annoyed *both* if I touted my social democratic politics & if my dad & his family stated their crypto-fascist views. Every death leaves a hole in a community's political fabric. 9+ years out, I'm ostracized from my family b/c I'm anti-Trump. Trump stated perhaps what my family felt but didn't say: those who don't support Trump are at fault when those who fail to support Trump are murdered. (7/7)

[ Finally, I want to also quote this one reply I also posted in the same thread: I ask everyone, now that I've stated this public, that I *know* you're going to want to search the Internet for it, & you will find a lot. Please, please, keep in mind that the Police Department & others basically lied to the public about some of the facts of the case. I seriously considered suing them for it, but ultimately it wasn't worth my time. But, please everyone ask me if you are curious about any of the truth of the details of the crime & its aftermath …

Fuck this whole "ecosystem". I mean really get right up in there and fuck it.

mesa-25.3.1# meson setup build ... Program python3 found: YES 3.9.6 3.9.6 (/usr/bin/python3) meson.build:964:2: ERROR: Problem encountered: Python (3.x) mako module >= 0.8.0 required to build mesa. ... mesa-25.3.1# port installed py-mako The following ports are currently installed: py-mako @1.3.10_0 (active)

This is the point where I typically decide, "I didn't want to build that anyway. I'll just go stick splinters under my fingernails instead."

Previously, previously.

Roomba maker iRobot has filed for bankruptcy and will be taken over by its Chinese supplier after the company that popularized the robot vacuum cleaner fell under the weight of competition from cheaper rivals.

"Today's announcement marks a pivotal milestone in securing iRobot's long-term future," said Gary Cohen, iRobot's chief executive. "The transaction will strengthen our financial position and will help deliver continuity for our consumers, customers and partners."

I guess their pivot to being an arms dealer didn't work out, huh.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Some time in the last ~6 months, eglCreatePlatformWindowSurface vanished from the libraries provided by MacPorts "mesa". Where do I find it? It is not in libGL and there is no libEGL.

macOS 14.7.7, mesa 25.3.1, xorg-libX11 1.8.12.

Previously.

With all of the different Linux kerenl stable releases happening (at least 1 stable branch and multiple longterm branches are active at any one point in time), keeping track of what commits are already applied to what branch, and what branch specific fixes should be applied to, can quickly get to be a very complex task if you attempt to do this manually. So I’ve created some tools to help make my life easier when doing the stable kerrnel maintenance work, which ended up making the work of tracking CVEs much simpler to manage in an automated way.

John Varley died two days ago on December 10, 2025. A great many will mourn him as a science fiction writer whose work they enjoyed. But this misses his moment.

In the mid-1970s, Varley exploded into science fiction like a phoenix. His "Eight Worlds" stories were set in a future where hyper-powerful aliens have killed everyone on Earth as a threat to its whales and porpoises and humanity survives everywhere else in the Solar System. Despite this bleak background, the stories were bright and inventive. People change gender on a whim. Wealthy and glorious cities turn to shacks and hovels when their holographic fronts are turned off at night. People bank their memories so that, upon death, they can be restarted with new memories. He wrote so many major stories per year that, in a resurrection of an old pulp-days practice, some had to be published under a pseudonym.

We were all dazzled. His work was full of impressive new ideas. And, outside of the Eight Worlds sequence, he wrote things like "In the Hall of the Martian Kings," which resurrected the possibility of intelligent life on Mars after the Mariner probes had apparently disproved that. Or "Air Raid," which made air travel terrifying again. [...]

Long, long ago, when I was yet unpublished, I found myself talking with Isaac Asimov at I forget which convention, when John Varley cruised by, trailed by enthusiastic fans. Asimov gazed sadly after him and said, "Look at him. A decade ago, everybody was asking, 'Who is John Varley?' A decade from now, everybody will be asking, 'Who is Isaac Asimov?'"

And that was John Varley's moment.

There are a lot of books and authors that I loved as a kid that, in hindsight, are not as good as I remembered. But John Varley is not one of those; he remains one of my favorite authors. I read Overdrawn at the Memory Bank in a second-hand "Best SF of the year" compilation when I was 10 years old and my head exploded. I read everything of his I could get my hands on after that. His vision of the future wasn't just robots and spaceships but it was optimistic and romantic about what we could become in a way I hadn't seen before.

I am sad to report that almost all of his work appears to be out of print! The pickings on bookshop.org are slim. When evangelizing him to people I always recommend The John Varley Reader as a great place to start. That one is widely available on eBay. So go buy that. Go. Do it now.

Which reminds me that one time in the 90s I loaned a friend my copy of the already-out-of-print-even-then Blue Champagne and they immediately lost it. I was so mad. This was before Amazon and eBay, but I eventually found some early online bookstore and ordered myself a new copy. When it arrived it turned out to be a signed first edition! So I was less mad then.

His Eight Worlds stories from the 70s and 80s are my favorites. Decades later, he returned to them with Steel Beach, which is his riff on Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, but slaps Heinlein around almost as much as Verhoeven did in Starship Troopers.

AI as a WordPress Fundamental:

The funny thing about this mental experiment is that your average WordPress user doesn't know what a database is, much less the fundamental role it plays within WordPress. It's taken for granted. Of course posts save, comments can be made, and settings are stored. Why wouldn't they? [...]

Yes, "imagine that". "What if."

What if, from the end-user to the plugin developer, they could take for granted that there's an AI model accessible to me by virtue of being in WordPress? What kinds of things would people use it for? What amazing things would people create that are built on the reliable presence of a capable LLM? [...]

Imagine if every single developer was empowered with AI capabilities without having to handle the complexities of AI integration. What if the developer just did something like

$$image = Ai_Client::prompt( 'Create an image that beautifully reflects this post content' ) ->with_text($post_content) ->generate_image();

Previously, previously, previously.

NEW HAVEN, CT -- Shedding new light on a previously undocumented effect of loneliness, a team of psychologists at Yale University found that at least 80% of Americans lack the social connections necessary to pull off a heist.

"When it comes to putting together a crew with the skills needed for a bank job or a jewel heist, a majority of Americans reported knowing just one or two guys, tops," said lead researcher Jane Iannitello, adding that only 20% had any safecrackers in their lives, a mere 16% knew any hacker prodigies with a rebellious streak, and fewer than 5% had access to Taiwanese acrobats doubling as masters of disguise.

"As they spend more and more time on social media, people just aren't going out to underground boxing rings, art auctions, or other settings where they are likely to meet a fast-talking charismatic type who pulls them into a daring heist. They often lose touch with their demolition experts after childhood, and though people may be eager for a big money payday that could mean walking away from the life for good, they are too afraid to put themselves out there for fear of rejection. Even in cases where they have a crew big enough for a heist, lonely Americans are often left feeling stranded due to a lack of getaway drivers, which forces them to brandish firearms at total strangers and demand that they drive, just drive."

While researchers cautioned the trend is likely to continue, they went on to state that some of the negative effects could be mitigated by reaching out to therapists with a plan, a keycard, and nothing to lose.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.